On the radio the other day, a polite and cautious chap from the World Health Organisation was trying not to insult the British authorities. The organisation had just advised that the antiviral drug Tamiflu should not be given to healthy people with “mild to moderate” cases of swine flu. Just to small children, pregnant women and those with weakening diseases. Since Britain chose to set up a website and recklessly hand the stuff out — without a doctor’s examination — to everybody who ticked a few boxes, the chap from the World Health Organisation was treading delicately. The point was made that Tamiflu is a strong drug, with side-effects, that in most cases all it does is shorten the flu by a day or so; and that with mass medication there is always a risk of the virus building immunity.

But Britain loves its medicines, and is loath to sweat it out. The spokesman was challenged with the usual: “But surely . . .”, and the reply tailed off apologetically, anxious not to give offence: “Well, if safety first is the prime condition in the UK . . .”

I turned away from the subject, depressed, to a fifth reading of a UK website that cheeringly belies this dim philosophy. Its subject is not safe, not belt-and-braces, not even legal. This is the chronicle, with photos, of the dark Friday night when two young men calling themselves Scott and Stepping Lightly completed the climb of the 518ft (158m) Blackpool Tower. They used climbing ropes, helmets, carabiner clips. They trained for weeks, scaling a 300ft mill chimney in Oldham the night before, for practice. Nobody knew, nobody saw, nobody in the bright-lit throbbing summer city was disturbed. The pair followed the endearing etiquette of their kind by taking up cleaning fluid and a cloth to erase grubby traces. “If you leave a mark you get rid of it. If you leave some damage you ring up and settle the bill . . . We don’t break and enter.”

The first the authorities knew of it was through pictures on the internet. Police are, of course, furious. They have to be. It’s their job. Irresponsible! Trespass! An “ill-advised stunt” undertaken “without permission or supervision”. Oh, and the owners add, suppose they had injured “innocent people” by falling? (Not very likely, given the carabiner lines and that they’d most likely have fallen on to the roof of the building below.) It was trespass, it was illegal, criminal. The only other time the tower was topped, in 1963, there were two arrests. One of the first internet responses to The Times report piously deplored the fact that the “taxpayer” would have had to clear them up if they’d fallen. All very responsible: all it needed was a post saying that they should have taken up a box of Tamiflu, in case one of them started coughing at the 300ft overhang.

And yet somehow, the heart sings. What they did was crazy, but only as a piece of carefully crafted original art is crazy. It has a quality of defiant freedom, of unmercenary and anonymous endeavour. Last year the eminent mountaineer Mike Robertson did an officially sanctioned climb of the tower, sponsored by Sony, but it stopped 12 ft short of the top, under the overhang where paying visitors may squeak and giggle on a glass panel called the Walk of Faith. These unofficial boys wanted to reach the flagpole, and they did so soon after midnight. The diary says: “The tension’s on. The temperature has dropped, talk about illuminations — the ambient light is intense . . . Don’t look down . . . that’s it. The top, the tip. Lost for words. But with a view like that . . . Incredible. Time to abseil the rope into the abyss.”

It is a kind of art, braver and harder work than much of what we are served as such. It is also a kind of crime, but less damaging than any other I can think of. It will be excoriated as a Bad Example, encouraging teenagers into silly stunts: but they do those anyway, and the main extra example they get from this one is a fierce emphasis on long training and professional safety gear. It does not reach the height of divine crazy skill achieved by Philippe Petit, who walked a wire between the late twin towers: yet it was in the same spirit.

Petit — whose vertiginous book I am still unable to read unless sitting safely on the floor — is another “criminal” but also a poet, a visionary, a craftsmanlike planner, a passionate and careful self-trainer. An artist. When I met the emotional Frenchman after the destruction of the twin towers his eyes filled with tears as he acknowledged not only the human tragedy but the structures themselves. “I loved them. I am the one who has married them”. Bit nuts. But you have to love him.

These adventurers (all right, criminals, illegals, fill in your own words) do something special and consoling for our urban landscapes. They are an extreme version of the leaping, flying skateboarders on the concrete wastelands, or those wonderful young practioners of “parkour” free-running who vault from bollard to railing, run vertically up walls to execute the “équilibre de chat”, and do elegant handsprings off street furniture. Being French in origin, parkour has a whole philosophy tacked on to it, an ethic of non-competitive challenge. Practitioners despise sport because “competition merely pushes people to fight against others for the satisfaction of a crowd or the benefit of a few business people”. They talk of parkour as a joyful belief that obstacles can be overcome. It is all so uplifting that I almost expect Mr Brown to come back from holiday and appoint a parkour czar (Heaven forfend).

For the rest of us, earthbound and plodding off for our Tamiflu-in-case, or timidly signing up to the padded weight-machines and 15ft climbing-wall at the leisure centre, these people offer something important. In an urban world of vast brutalist buildings and heartless machines, bossy signage and pedestrians forced into dank underpasses for cars’ convenience, such unregulated climbs and leaps teach a lesson. They show us that as the philosopher Protagoras said, “Man is the measure of all things”. Fragile bodies, transient and mortal, soft and vulnerable, throw a playful, defiant challenge to harsh immensities of concrete and steel. They celebrate human simplicity and human grandeur. Even the mild criminality of it intensifies the glow.

Can’t you see that it’s beautiful?

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